And another thing that irks me…

The corporate media are no longer the public’s watchdogs — they are now the lapdogs of the powerful, and gladly accept the muzzle and the leash too — unless the muzzling and leashing happen to cut into profits, or tarnish their now vacuous reputations, then they may snap a bit, but they’ll never bite, and especially never go for the jugular.

Just look at the history of the “big papers” – The Washington Post (WPost), The New York Times (NYT), The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) – in regard to war, the most serious and consequential activity a nation can get involved in.   In the cases of Cuba, the wars in Indochina, the invasion of Grenada, the invasion of Panama, the wars in Central America, the coup against Allende in Chile and the aftermath, the two invasions of Iraq, expanding the war in Afghanistan, intervention in Libya, etc, etc. — the WPost, the NYT and the WSJ and the rest of the corporate media supported all those actions, and others, well beyond the point of its being obvious that a majority of Americans no longer did.

Later, continued support would have cut into readership, so the editorial boards began to change their tune, usually with little or no acknowledgement that they had helped get the nation into the conflicts in the first place by blindly, and without question, accepting whatever the government told them.

And need I mention the almost totally uncritical corporate media treatment of Israeli actions, no matter how many the IDF kill or wound, nor how they treat the Palestinian population in the occupied West Bank and those other Palestinians in the world’s largest concentration camp, Gaza?  Some media in Israel are more critical of their government’s policies than any of the corporate media in the Unites States.

I’ll say nothing about the corporate media’s coverage of the whole situation with Iran; it’s too depressing.

In my estimation, the last time that the corporate media fulfilled their role as public watchdogs was when Richard Nixon was President. In regard to Watergate, it was the WPost and the NYT that kept the pressure up through excellent investigative reporting and analysis. After that highpoint, things began to change for the worse.  When Ronald Reagan became “The Teflon President” through the media’s not pressing him too diligently about reality, they finally abdicated their historic role and became little more than shills for the powerful and celebrities.

There are occasionally good pieces of reporting in the corporate media but the reporting is inconsistent. The main thrust is always toward supporting the Powers That Be, whether Dementos or Reprobates, the Royalty of Finance, or the Captains of Industry, with little excursions into romanticizing and lauding the British Royal Family and lamenting the latest Hollywood or sports scandal or the passing of “stars”.

I think a lot of the corporate media’s approach to things comes from wishing to be with the “in group” – you know, like adolescents in high school – and from sharing the same socio-economic worldview as the so-called leaders in government, finance and industry  – “pirates” would be a more precise term than “leaders”, but I digress…

Thank heaven for the World Wide Web and the few independent newspapers and magazines that still do true investigative reporting, or even just seriously analyze the mostly inaccurate, incomplete, and rarely contextualized picture that the corporate media present to the public as “fact” regarding both domestic and international affairs, but especially the latter.  The work done by FAIR – Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting – in regard to the lack of accuracy, fairness, standards and just plain logic, clarity and honesty in the corporate media’s reporting is, to my mind, exemplary.

I haven’t even mentioned Fox News yet — but that would be like descending into hell, and I have no Virgil at my side, so I won’t take that one on…although, now that the Cerberus of Fox, Glenn Beck, will soon be leaving, maybe I’ll think about it…

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(c) Gregory V Driscoll   2011